I’ve never been a Bill Maher fan because his politics and mine diverge so completely. However, I’ve always given Maher credit for having the courage to speak out against the mindless leftists who – let’s be honest – make up his fan base. He was back Friday night with a monologue telling his fellow progressives to get over their “progressophobia.” That term, from the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, refers to progressives who, when they see actual progress, refuse to acknowledge it.

In his almost nine-minute-long monologue, Maher points out that America has embraced most progressive causes, from gay rights to feminism to the end of institutional (as well as personal) racism in America. However, thanks to “progressophobia,” young leftists have something akin to “situational blindness, only what you can’t see is that your dorm in 2021 is better than the South before the Civil War.”

Maher also lashed out at the anti-White animus that animates young progressives. He said that the same situational blindness that has progressives claiming that we live in the worst times ever leads to “a growing belief in Whiteness as a malady and White people as irredeemable.”

What was especially appealing (to me, at least) about his riff was that Maher explicitly attacked Kevin Hart, a fabulously wealthy ($200 million) and admired Black actor, for moaning about the times in which we live:

There is a recurrent theme on the far left that things have never been worse. Kevin Hart expressed a view many hold when he told The New York Times, ‘You’re witnessing White power and White privilege at an all-time high.’ This is one of the big problems with wokeness -- that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts or ever be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism. But saying White power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous.

Higher than a century ago -- the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when the Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn’t stay in the same hotel as the White people they were working with? Higher than slavery? And I mean actual slavery, not ‘Prince doesn’t like his record contract’ slavery.

The other thing that made his monologue so appealing was that he gave it with Meathead sitting next to him – and by Meathead, I mean Rob Reiner, whose talent as a movie director has to be attributed to some sort of “idiot savant” thing because, when it comes to history, politics, economics, etc., you’ll seldom meet a man more devoid of knowledge, common sense, or decency.

See for yourself. You’ll enjoy the time you spend watching.

If you think America is more racist now than ever, more sexist than before women could vote and more homophobic than when blow jobs were a felony, you have #Progressophobia and you should adjust your mask because its covering your eyes. #BY pic.twitter.com/qFUFwO3eNJ

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) June 12, 2021

As for me, I’m going to continue hoping that honest, if mostly deeply misguided Maher, is yet another Jewish American who is beginning to realize that the Democrat party is not his friend and that it is antithetical to the liberties he believes it represents.

IMAGE: Bill Maher calls out leftists for progressophobia. Twitter screen grab.

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